


Being a Loose End

by FallLover



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Altean Shiro (Voltron), Alternate Universe, Amnesia, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Body Modification, Brainwashing, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Druid Shiro, F/M, I didn't finish season 7 and I don't care about season 8, Implied/Referenced Torture, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Torture, background allurance, body dysphoria sort of, referenced Loturra
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 12:31:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18778351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FallLover/pseuds/FallLover
Summary: "You could have been our greatest weapon."Could have been. Could have.There are secrets in Shiro's body. There are secrets he never knew and no one ever told him.





	Being a Loose End

**Author's Note:**

> In this AU, there was a final battle of sorts on Earth, where Haggar presumably perished. Allura survived. Shiro and Keith are a couple. The Lions are still around.
> 
> Inspired by various druid!Shiro and Altean ancestry!Shiro theories:  
> [Theory 1](https://angst-in-space.tumblr.com/post/152002045974/a-theoryabout-shiros-hair)  
> [Theory 2 Part 1](https://smolsarcasticraspberry.tumblr.com/post/157655867922/tell-me-these-druid-shiro-theories-please)  
> [Theory 2 Part 2](https://smolsarcasticraspberry.tumblr.com/post/157788527432/druid-shiro-theory-part-2-shiros-arm-following)

_"You could have been our greatest weapon."_

Could have been. _Could_ have.

There are secrets in Shiro's body. There are secrets he never knew and no one ever told him.

But there are moments in the dark when he clings to Keith and voices the memories he's slowly getting back, pieced together with information Keith gathered during Blades missions and that Pidge pulled out of Shiro's arm.

When Shiro was first captured, he was in shock. No one answered him other than to throw questions at him about Earth's military defenses, human physical capabilities, etc. Sam was taken away once the Galra discovered he was a scientist. He and Shiro hid Matt's intellect, to protect him. Matt was somehow in more shock than Shiro, so it was relatively easy.

Shiro fought in the arena. Afterward he'd rest in a cell, wondering if every night would be his last. Either because of his sickness or the other fighters or the guards or the questionable 'food'. He fought for Matt and Sam and Keith and his own sanity.

They cut his face first. It hurt like hell, but he pressed on. It was when the enemy - a group of them this time, versus Shiro on his own - cut his arm off that Shiro fully lost it. It felt like the worst of his attacks when it happened. He didn't even see the burst of energy. Or how it obliterated the enemy. He just felt his senses white out.

He lived long enough to see the arena cheer one last time as all his enemies fell around him, with Shiro falling last. He never saw Haggar watching with interest.

Haggar put her scientists to work in secret - though not secret enough from the Blades. Haggar's team discovered that the dead human was part-Altean, albeit a small part. And, better still, the kind with magic. Druids were rare enough that Haggar pushed for cloning. For whatever reason, Alteans were difficult to clone, and ones with magic next to impossible. The process was of little to no value for Galrans. But humans were oddly easy to work with, and that precious magic ability stuck around, too.

They got rid of Shiro's illness - the wonders of advanced tech, and largely because the illness was part of what was blocking Shiro from using his abilities fully.

But they could only do so much. These things were constant: Shiro's physical age, his physical appearance, the scar over his nose, the white lock of hair over his forehead that appeared when he first used his power, and the limb he lost, which was always weak and shriveled away.

Haggar wasn't bothered by any of this. The limb actually made things easier. She liked experimenting with cybernetics. She gave him a tool for him to use as a weapon, to channel his power, and for Haggar to keep extra control.

Shiro had his memories. Most of them. His recent ones were blurry, largely around his time with the Galra and the trauma of being taken hostage, stuck in an arena to fight for his life, losing an arm, and what he never realized was his own death. Haggar's attempts at brainwashing and teaching him magic exacerbated his memory issues, but he always had good physical memory. He became a great fighter with the arm.

He was in for repairs - groggy from getting knocked in the head during the fight, even when he won - when the Blades broke him out.

Haggar worked harder on the later clones. Made sure they were easier to control. Made them suitable as double agents, once Team Voltron appeared on the scene and she noticed who drove the Black Lion. She never expected her creation to fall back into her hands, or to see how he'd modified the arm she gave him, even if he never unlocked its full potential.

_"You could have been our greatest weapon."_

Said to fuck with him. Said to haunt. Said to throw the chips around and see where they fell. She let him go, in the end. It was fun. It was interesting. The other clones were ready to use at any time. This one was clearly too fragile.

Haggar had always been too quick to dismiss what didn't suit her.

When Shiro was absorbed by Black, a meter went off in a lab, and Kuron, not the original Shiro, not the second Shiro, or even the third, or fourth, was woken up and released.

Haggar did better this time. Supposedly.

Allura was beyond frustrated with herself when she finally realized that Shiro could use magic. When the world stopped ending for five minutes and she could think more about how his original prosthetic had worked and talk to other Alteans with magic. They started training together. It started with meditation and moved to combat. Talking about 'oneness' and focus, and sometimes 'just whatever the heck works'. They discussed how to discover where that Altean bloodline came from, what might have drawn them to Earth, if there were others out there. Sometimes they chatted about their personal lives. Both of them cared for each other, but had such mutual respect that they had never been as close as they might have been. The training helped break those barriers down. Lotor came up. Adam came up. Then Lance. Then Keith.

Shiro talked about Kuron. The double agent, the unwitting weapon, the person who had been a friend before his body turned against him, as Shiro had always expected it to, but not like this. Shiro's guilt that they killed this other version of himself, who was - to Shiro - simply unlucky enough to not break free of the conditioning. That he caused so much damage. That all those other clones perished. That maybe the cloning facility where Kuron fought Keith wasn't the only one. Keith has been looking and hadn't found any more, but still. Shiro still woke up in the morning with the realization that his skin wasn't his - it was Kuron's - and it was - they were all clones, after all, the original Shiro was long dead - and it wasn't again - because Shiro was dead, and Shiro wasn't really Shiro, was he?

Sometimes he and Keith sat in Black's cockpit and just listened. She was comforting to her two pilots, the only two left standing. Or wrapped around each other, with Keith repeating over and over, "I love you, you're real, I love you." Black would hum. Would glare at the rest of the world that dared to hurt them.

There were secrets in Shiro's body that he didn't know, might never know. But when he listened to Black, clung to Keith, trained and chatted with Allura, spent time with all these others in his life, a life that kept on going for far longer than he'd ever expected, in a universe far bigger than he'd ever imagined... Other things mattered more.


End file.
